AMA Highlights: Unicly
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
April 15, 2021–6 min read.
On Tuesday April 6, we welcomed Leia Fisher from Unicly into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for a conversation about fractionalizing and trading NFTs.
Unicly is solving the issue of NFT accessibility through fractionalization and liquidity by allowing more of us to own Punks, Beeples, and more.
Users can acquire shards of an NFT or collection which can be traded via UnicSwap. Fractionalised NFTs can also be de-fractionalised via a voting process.
Unicly is community-governed from day one — the UNIC token will be a fair-launch via the upcoming liquidity mining program for 90% of the UNIC token supply.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
Hi Leia and welcome, thank you for joining us today. Without a doubt, NFTs have been a significant focus area for us and many in the community throughout the past several months.
Could you start us off with an introduction and some background on Unicly?
Leia Fisher
Hey everyone! I’m Leia. I’m a designer and developer, and a huge fan of art. I’ve been participating in the NFT space for many years.
Unicly is a protocol to combine, fractionalize, and trade NFTs with guaranteed liquidity. The protocol allows users to wrap any number of NFTs together into a “uToken”, which is the ERC20 equivalent of the NFT collection. Users can then provide liquidity and experience AMM-type price discovery of these fractionalized NFT collections. Find me on Twitter at 0xLeia.
Daniel Dal Bello
Let’s start at the beginning. The non-fungible movement has been growing and growing of late, so what is it that you like about NFTs?
Do you have a favorite style or implementation of NFT or maybe a particular collection?
Leia Fisher
NFTs are the next natural progression for transferrable digital assets. Because I’m a designer and into games, I like the NFT implementation of The Sandbox and Decentraland.
Daniel Dal Bello
Unicly is designed to be “community-run from day one”. In our experience, the typical pathway to community governance has been a progressive one. What we have often seen is a beginning phase where founding and development teams govern early decisions with a view to gradually divest that power to the community.
For the stage you are in with Unicly, why do you feel a full commitment to the community from day one is the best approach?
What are the primary risks here?
Leia Fisher
Because we want to fractionalize NFTs, it means that we will invariably be dealing with high-value assets. To make the platform community-driven assures users that we will not take advantage of our position to unfairly profit from the NFTs on our platform and encourages the longevity of our project.
Ray Reijnders
What is the plan to continually engage the community and develop a loyal community base necessary for reaching a place where your community-run protocol can thrive?
Leia Fisher
From day one, we will start with one token in order to vote in the initial whitelisted pools. Then we will start with community engagement towards choosing Whitelisted Launch Partners, including discussions on “uniqueness” and quality. Active participation is how we will thrive.
Rowan Zwiers
Unicly is running a “fair launch” which involves liquidity mining the UNIC token with an inflation rate decreasing by 5% monthly over an estimated 40 months. This is a very commonly used model due to its simplicity in putting tokens in the hands of those willing to commit to it.
Of course, as we’ve seen many such launches, these models are not without flaws.
Why did you choose to pursue a fair launch and are there any caveats to this?
Leia Fisher
Any token distribution system will have its drawbacks, and there is no perfect system. The fair launch better suits our goals and community of real investors. No presale dumpers. True supporters will mine or buy UNIC tokens.
We believe in putting our faith in the community that we cultivate.
Daniel Dal Bello
One of the key selling points of NFTs is their inherent uniqueness or non-fungibility. Platforms like NFTX or NFT20 have brought fungibility to NFT collections, which some have argued dilutes their value/uniqueness.
To a large degree, fractionalization of NFTs via Unicly contributes to reducing that notion of non-fungibility.
To what extent do you agree or disagree and do you see this trend as a threat to the original value proposition of NFTs?
Leia Fisher
The fractionalization of NFTs does not change their fundamental properties or value. For example, the value of a broadcast license for a movie does not change with the number of people tuned into it and the value of that airtime is completely derived from that playing. If the NFT were to be decoupled from the contract then none of its inherent value is lost at the end.
Rowan Zwiers
When fractionalizing/sharding NFTs, the underlying NFTs are wrapped — how is security guaranteed on these NFTs?
Leia Fisher
All of our contracts can be clearly audited here, https://docs.unic.ly/smart-contracts/security-audit.
Daniel Dal Bello
Holders of the UNIC token have governance rights and the ability to accrue 0.5% of AMM swap fees when staked as xUNIC tokens. What further value propositions, if any, will token holders enjoy?
Leia Fisher
Governance and voting rights to unlock and bid on specific NFTs.
Rowan Zwiers
Whether it be losing private keys or sending tokens to wrong or incompatible addresses (smart contracts/burn addresses/exchange addresses), people inevitably lose their access to tokens often.
How will the de-fractionalization process work if a few “pieces of the puzzle” are missing and effectively lost forever?
Is that something that is front of mind or simply not relevant?
Leia Fisher
Here lie the same risks as any other crypto-assets and because of the decentralized nature of it, it’s the responsibility of the owners to protect their keys.
Rowan Zwiers
If several people own fractionalized representations of one wrapped NFT — how is the process started to unwrap the NFT when several private keys are lost?
Or is the wrapped NFT never to be unwrapped anymore in the first place?
Leia Fisher
As long as a critical number of users do not lose their keys then all NFTs can be unwrapped based on the criteria that the initial wrapper established. But, in the improbable event that multiple, independent users were to lose access to their keys then those NFTs may continue to remain locked.
Daniel Dal Bello
The fractionalization of NFTs intrinsically makes them more accessible to users.
However, and at the same time, we have seen gas fees getting in the way and causing an “exodus” of smaller players into other non-Eth ecosystems. At 100 gwei, smart contract interactions cost anywhere from $30 and up.
Are there any plans to make Unicly more scalable or rather accessible for users?
Leia Fisher
We are aware of this issue and are looking at other layer-2 options and possible accessibility to BSC.
Daniel Dal Bello
With the UNIC launch quickly approaching, could you run us through your roadmap? What is the most exciting thing coming up?
Leia Fisher
Yes! Our platform’s mainnet will launch tomorrow, and now the fun part begins getting the community involved. Do take a look at our sequences here https://medium.com/unicly/hello-world-unicly-1206e590b66a.
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
Unicly is an NFT platform that is using fractionalization of both NFTs and NFT collections and an AMM to improve NFT liquidity.
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